The Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science
The United States and sixteen other countries have endorsed a declaration on the future of science, outlining an ambition to “renew and strengthen our science ecosystems and usher in a golden age of discovery and prosperity.” Other signatories are said to include the UK, Germany, Italy and New Zealand.
The “Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science”, as the document has been billed, is structured around three topics: improving institutions, AI, and talent. Much of the language reflects previous policy papers from the Trump administration, in particular July’s Science: a Golden Age.
The declaration notes the “value of a deliberate portfolio of funding mechanisms,” including long-duration awards, rapid grants, and prizes and challenges, and endorses the importance of different institutional models:
“We encourage experimentation with new institutional models for science that provide varying levels of autonomy, resources, and direction.”
This echoes a major theme of the earlier Golden Age report, which was authored by the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios. This publication attracted headlines for its criticism of the “legacy institutions” which the American science system was argued to have become overly dependent on.
The Kyoto Vision also welcomes the growing deployment of metascience within governments, and commits to uphold integrity standards within the research system:
“Science that is reproducible and transparent, communicates error and uncertainty, is subject to unbiased peer review, and recognizes negative and null results as valuable contributions to scientific knowledge.”
The language used is heavily reminiscent of the Restoring Gold Standard Science in America executive order issued by President Trump last May, which attacked various Biden-era scientific initiatives and was badged as a “call to excellence” for US researchers.
The declaration also commits to further harnessing of AI for scientific purposes, using the term super intelligence (or SI) which the Trump administration has recently mandated be used in lieu of artificial intelligence, saying that the new phrasing “more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies.”
The Kyoto Vision communiqué frames it thus:
“We encourage research that thoughtfully integrates SI into scientific workflows, using it to reason across vast bodies of knowledge, build higher-fidelity models of physical and biological systems, and drive autonomous, closed-loop discovery. We endeavor to expand access to the SI tools, scientific data, computing infrastructure, and experimental facilities at the scale researchers now require.”
A final section in the short document sees ministers committing to identify and invest in “meritorious students and early-career researchers” and encourage joint programmes to cultivate scientific talent. The previous Science: a Golden Age document had no small focus on the supposed “corrosion of the merit principle” in academia, arguing for a refocusing on the individual scientist rather than the “political fashions of the day.”
The Kyoto Vision was endorsed by science and technology ministers from the 17 countries at the 23rd annual meeting of the Science and Technology in Society (STS) forum, which is currently taking place in Kyoto.